Next month, Pleasanton’s Britney Cooper will travel to Belize to spend her holidays volunteering in an orphanage.

“I love helping others, and I plan to make it my life’s work,” said Cooper, 18, who graduated from Foothill High School and is attending her first year at Las Positas College.

Working with children is nothing new for Cooper. In addition to baby-sitting for five families, last summer she volunteered at a camp for children hosted by Valley Humane Society, and she worked as a camp counselor for the City of Pleasanton’s Ridge Runners camp. In fact, working as a counselor, Cooper encountered a child she will never forget.

“There was a boy about 8 years old who was going through a tough time,” Cooper said. “He was very shy and small for his age.”

Some of the other kids would ask him how he could be 8 since he looked so small.

“This made him visibly upset,” Cooper said.

So she decided to befriend the boy, spending time with him during hikes.

“I took him under my wing,” she said. “It took a lot of time, but eventually he started to open up.”

Cooper said the boy was thrilled when she asked if she could take home a video game to play that he had created at an earlier summer camp.

“After that when he got dropped off for camp he ran to me and gave me the biggest bear hug,” she said, smiling.

Cooper made such an impact that the boy’s mother signed him up for additional camps. When summer ended, she wrote a note to Cooper thanking her for her thoughtfulness in making her son feel special.

“The letter also said I’d inspired him to become a counselor when he is in high school,” Cooper said.

Such fulfilling moments with children have inspired Cooper to major in sociology with a goal of transferring in 2016 to UC Berkeley, where she will study social justice.

“Ultimately my dream is to be a human trafficking investigator for the government’s Immigrations and Customs Unit to assist in eradicating human trafficking in the United States,” Cooper said.

Of course, traveling to the orphanage in Belize is not an inexpensive trip for a college student, costing just under $2,800. While Cooper has saved her money from baby-sitting, working as a counselor and currently working part-time for Pleasanton’s Alviso Adobe Community Park to make ends meet, every dollar she can generate now will ease her financial stress. To learn more or to make a donation to Cooper’s efforts, contact her at bcooper611@gmail.com.

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